New York City Offering 62.5M Square Feet of Space

Business Insider has the Amazon HQ2 bid for New York City offered up 62.5 Million Square Feet of space. One of the 238 cities to submit a bid, New York, while it doesn’t have a low-cost of living it does have the tech talent with a city full of people. The higher cost of living also brings a higher cost of doing business and salaries. Amazon, for the most part, is usually considered a frugal company that can recruit talent to anywhere. Because of this, I think the best selling point for New York might not matter as some of the other requirements.

The city offered up 4 sites. Midtown West and the Financial District in Manhattan, Brooklyn Tech Triangle and Long Island City in Queens. You have to combine all four possible areas to get the 62.5 million square feet of space. NYC is not offering any special tax incentives, at the least, nothing that isn’t’ available to other companies.

The New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, hoping to bring Amazon to the city. However, on bid day Business Insider says that he also said that Amazon is “very destructive” to local communities and businesses.

A few pundits have said that the best place is and has always been New York City, because of the tech talent, but I don’t think that they will make the short list cut.

What Amazon is Looking For?

HQ2 will be the second Amazon headquarters in North America. We are looking for a location with strong local and regional talent—particularly in software development and related fields—as well as a stable and business-friendly environment to continue hiring and innovating on behalf of our customers.How will the selection process work?
The HQ2 team is evaluating each of the proposals based on the selection criteria outlined in the RFP.